Saturday night (Dec. 22), local rock’n’roll power duo Japandroids capped off a year full of highlights with a sold-out hometown show at the Rickshaw Theatre.

The concert ends a four-month leg of an ongoing tour to support the band’s sophomore success story Celebration Rock, an album found in the top ten of many prominent year-end “best of” lists, including Rolling Stone, SPIN and Consequence of Sound. Although very flattered by the onslaught of praise, drummer/vocalist David Prowse and singer/guitarist Brian King tend to look elsewhere to measure the band’s success.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to buy into the hype, whether it’s negative or positive,” Prowse says over the phone while en route from Calgary to Vancouver. “That said, I am aware of all these accolades that we’ve been getting. Friends will pass them along and people [we] work with will pass them on, [we] get a lot of forwarded emails saying you made this list or that list, and all of that is incredibly flattering.

“But I think the way that I judge the success of our band – is just by seeing the amount of people coming to our shows night after night. All over the US, and all over Canada, and all over Europe. Seeing how many people come out to see you play and how many people know the words to your songs. Even in places where English is not the most common language there are still lots of people singing along.”

The critically adored record rides high on Prowse’s near-ceaseless driving beats and King’s leave-nothing-left attack on lead vocals and guitar. The breakneck pace and energy of the thirty-five minute, eight song album – including a cover of The Gun Club’s “For the Love of Ivy” – is summed up perfectly by its straightforward title.

To achieve the consistent vitality that’s helped catapult Celebration Rock into the global spotlight, the band looked to previous album Post-Nothing. Focusing on those elements of the record that worked best in concert, Prowse and King built the furious momentum of Celebration Rock on a foundation of Post-Nothing’s most engaging moments.

“After you tour as long as we did on one record, it becomes pretty obvious which songs people react to in a certain way,” Prowse says. “We wanted a record that would have more of those high points in the show, and to have that sustained kind of frenzied atmosphere throughout the show – We had no expectations as far as critical or commercial success, or whatever you want to call it. At the heart of it, we just wanted to make a record that we were proud of, and we did that. Obviously, the icing on the cake is when other people like it too.”

Actually, other people love it. And they prove it night after night by “loosing their minds” at Japandroids shows around the world. For the band, Prowse admits, providing fans with a live dose of the record’s combustible, embrace-the-moment brilliance is of the utmost importance.

“People think that being on tour is the same thing as being on a road trip and it’s not, it’s not a vacation. I mean, it’s probably the best job you could ever ask for but it’s still a job and it’s something that we take very seriously. Obviously we love playing music but it’s also something that can be very stressful for us because we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to give people the best show we can every night.”

Part of that ethos includes not wasting the crowd’s time with an encore routine. Only once on this tour – in San Francisco at the Fillmore because “they just wouldn’t leave” – and twice in the history of the band have they returned to a stage once leaving it.

“We try and just basically wear people out before we even get to them wanting an encore,” Prowse says. “The whole encore thing, I think it’s a really cool idea when it’s genuine, but it’s so obviously staged now and, I don’t know, I just find the whole thing kind of gross. Bryan feels the same way, so we’d rather just leave it on the stage and play until we can’t play anymore.”

And that is how Japandroids have spent the last four months straight and the better part of the last three years, giving themselves, both emotionally and physically, to the job they love so dearly and to the people who come out to watch them work.

Now, with Saturday night’s hometown show in the books, the band will wind down an admittedly “wonderful year” at home for the holidays. With a rare month off before hitting the road again at the end of January, Prowse says the opportunity to do nothing exciting over the break is all the excitement he desires.

“When you’re on tour, every night is Friday night pretty much. I’m looking forward to having a month of Sunday mornings.”

Check out the band’s video for the searing single “The House That Heaven Built,” below.

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